Monday, 18 February 2013

Why reading matters (more than ever)

Ian McEwan has come up with a fine
definition of what fiction does. In the latest GuardianReviewhe speaks of ‘fiction’s generous knack of
annotating the microscopic lattice-work of consciousness, the small print of
subjectivity’. I could have done with this definition last week, when I gave a lunch-time
lecture to the Ouse Valley branch of the English
Speaking Union, at Sharnbrook
in Bedfordshire. I’d had a difficult snowy journey getting there, but it was
worth it: the large audience listened well, and their questions kept me on my
toes. My subject was ‘Why reading matters (more than ever)’ and I was trying,
in the central part of my argument, to pinpoint three reasons why reading fiction
is a valuable human activity.

I began with the novel’s role in increasing
our capacity for empathy. In his latest book, The
Better Angels of our Nature, Steven Pinker suggests that ‘Fiction may
expand readers’ circle of empathy by seducing them into thinking and feeling
like people very different from themselves’. He wonders whether the rise of the
novel may actually have hastened the arrival of the Enlightenment:

The ordering of
events is in the right direction: technological advances in publishing, the
mass production of books, the expansion of literacy, and the popularity of the
novel all preceded the major humanitarian reforms of the 18th
century. (p.213)

Starting with Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Oliver
Twist, Pinker points to novels such as Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran which, he
claims, have ‘all raised public awareness of the suffering of people who might
otherwise have been ignored’.

My second point was that the novel explores
subjectivity, ‘our consciousness of being conscious’, as David Lodge puts it in
Consciousness
and the Novel(2002). It’s here I’d have brought in McEwan. ‘Fiction’s
generous knack of annotating the microscopic lattice-work of consciousness’ is
a sentence worth savouring:it testifies
to metaphor’s power, in the right hands, at once to focus and to enlarge our
perception of the world.

I tried at Sharnbrook to demonstrate what,
from now on, I’ll always call the small print of subjectivity by quoting from
the opening page of Hilary
Mantel’s Wolf Hall:

‘So now get up.’

Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen;
knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turn sideways; his
eyes are turned towards the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out.
One blow, properly placed, could kill him now.

At first this reads like straightforward
third-person narrative, though told in the present tense, not the ‘Once upon a
time’ of the omniscient author. But it isn’t. It is first-person narrative, the
voice and the viewpoint of Thomas Cromwell himself (the book’s protagonist),
disguised as someone else’s, someone detached. In this first paragraph we
cannot yet know whether what we’re reading is indirect free narrative: ‘One
blow, properly placed, could kill him now’ sounds like the narrator’s
assessment of the danger Thomas is in; it doesn’t sound, yet, like Thomas’s own
view of his plight – though that’s exactly what it is. Mantel’s narrative
sleight of hand is breathtaking:

Blood from the gash on his head – which was
his father’s first effort – is trickling across his face. Add to this, his left
eye is blinded; but if he squints sideways, with his right eye he can see that
the stitching of his father’s boot is unravelling. The twine has sprung clear
of the leather, and a hard knot in it has caught his eyebrow and opened another
cut.

At this moment, which could be his last,
Thomas is suddenly alert to a minute particular: the stitching on the boot coming
undone. Nearly dead, he is alive enough
to register the significance of the hard knot of twine that has gashed his
eyebrow.Mantel here provides a perfect
illustration of ‘the microscopic lattice-work of consciousness’ – hence my
regret that I couldn’t include McEwan’s definition in my lecture last week.

My final point was about the importance of the
past in the writing of fiction today. I did not mean simply the writing of today’s
novels set in the historical past, as Wolf
Hall is set in the reign and at the court of Henry VIII. I meant the way the
past informs, indeed shapes, the way writers write today. And specifically I
was talking about the literary, not just the historical, past. There is, for
instance, a wonderful scene in Wolf Hall
in which Cromwell (still only ‘he’ –never directly referred to by Mantel herself
as ‘Cromwell’) is talking to the poet and courtier Thomas Wyatt
about Anne Boleyn. Anne is not yet married to the King and Cromwell is trying
to assess the danger – to herself and to men such as Wyatt – if, after her
coronation, Henry should discover her past affairs. During the conversation
Wyatt betrays – as Cromwell intends him to – his own feelings about Anne and
about the way she used to treat him:

‘She liked me, I
think, or she liked to have me in thrall to her, it amused her. We would be
alone, she would let me kiss her, and I always thought … but that is Anne’s
tactic, you see, she says yes, yes, yes, then she says no.’

Wyatt is hurt and scared; hurt by the way
she treated him in the past and by her indifference now, and scared about his own
future safety. Although Mantel never says so - she does not have to - this
scene is a splendid commentary on Wyatt’s famous poem ‘They flee from me that
sometime did me seek’. Indeed, as I tried to show, the scene could not have
been written in the way Mantel wrote it, did Wyatt’s poem not exist.

Thus the literature of the past shapes the
way writers write today, and vice versa.
I wanted in my Sharnbrook lecture to make these points as forcefully as I
could; to explain that reading literature matters because it gives us access to
the voices of the past, to a conversation in which today’s writers and readers
can join; and to contend that this matters (more than ever) because we live in
a world so obsessed with the present that the loss of historical memory has
become the crisis of our time. As Eliot once reminded us:

“Someone said,
‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they
did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.”

Adrian Barlow

www.adrianbarlow.co.uk

[illustration: (lino-cut) the emblem of the
Sharnbrook Press, which seems to have existed briefly during and shortly after
the Second World War. If anyone has information about this Press, please get in
touch. It published journals such as Teaching
English in Schools and The School Library
Review.

About Me

I live in Gloucestershire. Before retiring, I was Director of Public and Professional Programmes at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. I'm President of the English Association and series editor of Cambridge Contexts in Literature. My recent publications include 'World and Time: Teaching Literature in Context' (C.U.P. 2009) and 'Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning’ published by Lutterworth Press in March 2012.
I’m a trustee of the Kempe Trust, and write a Kempe blog about my research into the stained glass of Charles Eamer Kempe and his Studio: http://thekempetrust.co.uk
For (a lot) more about me, go to my website:
www.adrianbarlow.co.uk